Clint Eastwood’s ‘The Mule’ Kicks Its Way Onto December Release Calendar

Warner Bros. is giving a Dec. 14 wide release to Clint Eastwood’s latest movie The Mule, which he not only directed, but stars in.

As is standard for Eastwood, the four-time Oscar winning filmmaker finished the film early: Production wrapped in early July and a cut was recently shown to Warner Bros. brass over the weekend which wowed them. The Mule enters a pre-Christmas weekend that includes such wide entries as Sony’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Universal’s Mortal Engines, STX’s Jennifer Lopez romantic comedy Second Act as well as Annapurna’s limited release of Adam McKay’s Vice about the George W. Bush and Dick Cheney cabinet.

In The Mule, Eastwood stars as Earl Stone (Eastwood), a man in his 80s who is broke, alone, and facing foreclosure of his business when he is offered a job that simply requires him to drive.  Easy enough, but, unbeknownst to Earl, he’s just signed on as a drug courier for a Mexican cartel.  He does well—so well, in fact, that his cargo increases exponentially, and Earl is assigned a handler.  But he isn’t the only one keeping tabs on Earl; the mysterious new drug mule has also hit the radar of hard-charging DEA agent Colin Bates (Bradley Cooper).  And even as his money problems become a thing of the past, Earl’s past mistakes start to weigh heavily on him, and it’s uncertain if he’ll have time to right those wrongs before law enforcement, or the cartel’s enforcers, catch up to him.

The Mule features an ensemble cast including Cooper, Taissa Farmiga, Michael Pena, and Laurence Fishburne.

We hear that The Mule is more in line with the legendary filmmaker’s commercial vehicle Gran Torino which debuted limited on Dec. 12, 2008 and expanded over Christmas gradually swelling to an enormous $148M stateside, his highest grossing title as an actor, and second-highest as a director.  Nick Schenk wrote The Mule and it’s produced by Eastwood, Imperative Entertainment’s Dan Friedkin and Bradley Thomas; as well as Jessica Meier, Tim Moore and Kristina Rivera.